NY Post on Bronx Synagogue Plot Informant

By Ethan Brown, Section Terror Trials
Posted on Fri May 22, 2009 at 01:39:00 PM EST
Tags: Bronx Synagogue (all tags)

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The New York Post has a useful little primer on the informant at the center of the alleged plot to bomb a Bronx synagogue. According to the Post, the informant is an upstate New York motel owner named Shahed Hussain.

Hussain became an informant after being busted on fraud charges; Hussain worked as a translator for the DMV and helped immigrants cheat on driver's tests. His bid to become an informant, according to the Post, was driven by a desire to win leniency on the fraud charges and avoid being deported to Pakistan. [More...]

Hussain also worked as an informant in a case against Yassin M. Aref, an Albany imam convicted on money laundering and terrorism charges in 2007.

In the Aref case, the government claimed that Aref and his co-defendant sought to launder money in a plot to purchase a shoulder-fired missile that was going to be used in an attack on the Pakistani Mission to the United Nations in New York. Aref claimed, however, that he was simply helping out a friend (informant Hussain, who then owned a pizza shop) with a loan.

There is little doubt, however, that the plot was entirely fictitious--the New York Times described it as a fake missile plot --and that it was hatched by the informant and not the defendants.

Yet another reason to be skeptical of the Bronx synagogue case and yet another reason to push the Justice Department to re-asses how it conducts anti-terrorism investigations.

As an attorney for Shahawar Matin Siraj--whose case I mentioned yesterday--once told me: "It's a sham that we conduct terrorism investigations by having informants create fictional terror plots."

For more on the Aref case, go here.

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NY Post on Bronx Synagogue Plot Informant | 6 comments (6 topical)

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And one of the defendants is so insane (5.00 / 2) (#2)
by scribe on Fri May 22, 2009 at 01:57:29 PM EST

that, when he was before the immigration judge previously, he was deemed too insane to deport back to Haiti.

Seriously:

Three did prison time for drug dealing - and the fourth is a mentally ill Haitian immigrant found too insane to be deported.
* * *

The fourth man, Laguerre Payen, 27, had served 15 months for assault and was supposed to be deported to Haiti. But an immigration judge stayed the order because Payen, a paranoid schizophrenic, was judged insane.

* * *
The fourth man, Payen, was hospitalized after his arrest. "He was off his meds - needing to be particularly crazy to do the deed," said a law enforcement source.

Payen had done time for shooting two teens with a BB gun.

His cousin, Marie Payen, said his mother also is mentally ill. His father is dead, and his brother, a U.S. Marine, is the only normal one, she said.

Still, she couldn't picture him as a terrorist. "I know he's not normal, but he's not that kind of person. I don't even think he knows how to read," she said.

These are "the worst of the worst". Knuckleheads.

But they are dark-skinned and have Muslim sort of identity. The Designated Other....

On the other hand, white supremacists with $10 million a year from their trust funds, Hitler's own china in the china closet, recipes for dirty bombs and pounds of radioactive material in the basement? Only one peep.

So true... (none / 0) (#1)
by kdog on Fri May 22, 2009 at 01:53:48 PM EST

spending a year talking some clowns into doing something violently stupid isn't preventing terrorism in the slightest...like the rest of our anti-terror policies, its only to make us feel better or safer...nothing is being accomplished. It's illusionary "feel good" nonsense that does more harm than good.

If this is the model plan to "keep us safe", I'd rather be in danger, cuz this sh*t is pointless. I'd find total enlightenment on earth before these clowns woulda found C4 on their own...guaranteed.

But, this way they get to (5.00 / 1) (#3)
by Inspector Gadget on Fri May 22, 2009 at 02:46:21 PM EST

time the arrests to fill a need in keeping the public scared of terror attacks and thinking the techniques being used (spying on us all, and torture) are keeping us safe.


: I'm outraged that our tax doolars are going to (none / 0) (#4)
by allimom99 on Fri May 22, 2009 at 04:21:01 PM EST

pay off these sleazeballs. I guess there isn't enough real crime to keep all those FBI agents busy, What a shame.

that's 'dollars' (none / 0) (#5)
by allimom99 on Fri May 22, 2009 at 04:21:22 PM EST

Our government as bully... taking advantage of the (none / 0) (#6)
by jawbone on Fri May 22, 2009 at 05:34:15 PM EST

poor, disadvantaged, gullible, and ill. Wow.

And these guys will be scalps for the FBI, DOJ, NYPD, and Obama administration.